Call and Response . . .
. . . in the time of “Hope and Change”:
“There is infinite hope, but not for us.” ~ Franz Kafka
“It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.” ~ Dutch proverb when struggling for freedom from Spain
A Blog is Like a Third Leg.
Now that I’ve amputated mine from my life, the wound has closed up as completely as if I never had one. Where on earth did I ever find the time? And the drive?
I know this place feels a little orphaned and half-empty and half-built, as yet. Now that this month’s grueling work is almost over, I will try to hang around more, and supply some living plants. (Well, after I do three years of taxes. That’s apparently one of the things I was blogging instead of doing. I wonder how many more will turn up, like bloated corpses that died of neglect?) I like the company here so much. I love hearing your voices on the front page. I know that it isn’t finished or furnished yet. It doesn’t quite have a life that’s “taken,” yet. The good stuff is here but it doesn’t coalesce into something greater than the sum of the parts, yet. Please don’t give up!
“CIA interrogators used the waterboarding technique on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the admitted planner of the September 11 attacks, 183 times.”
Oh, really? How about 2,974 times?
Baby Watchers: Have You Seen This Mysterious Phenomenon?
My 33-year-old nephew Matt, a new father, described watching his baby daughter’s face “scroll through” the full repertoire of human expressions and emotions — in her sleep. And only in her sleep.
I’ve seen this too! But thirty years ago, when my niece, Matt’s cousin Paloma, was a baby in the first few months of life. Awake, she had about four basic, dazed expressions; she looked the way you might expect a newly minted person to look — foggy, vague, not yet fully here. But when she slept, her face knew the Greek comedy and tragedy masks, and so much more: hilarity, amusement, disgust, despondency, sly cynicism, wistfulness, ennui — sophisticated, seasoned expressions that you’d think an old Frenchwoman would have had to earn by six or seven decades of hard living. Non, je ne regrette rien!
What is this?? What stage of sleep does it correspond to, what’s going on in the brain? Is the baby dreaming, or in deeper, dreamless sleep? How would a neurologist or a child-development expert explain it? I’m not sure they could. It’s been shown that emotions are inseparable from their physical expression: to make the face is to have the feeling, and vice versa. So we’re hardwired for emotions we have yet to grow into? Expressions we regard as exquisitely cultural and social, like full-blown language, are actually biological? What?
A baby that can manage at most a wail, an unfocused stare, and a goofy, convulsive smile when awake appears, in its sleep, to rehearse the dramas of a lifetime. I wonder if this was one of the things that inclined people to believe in reincarnation. A sleeping baby lets its mask slip, reveals its old soul, remembers its long, rich lives and tumultuous experience.
Have you seen this?
Ripple Effect
At The Glittering Eye, Dave asks a friend in the construction business how it’s going (the exact same thing I do to feel the pulse of the body economic) and hears a story of concussion waves of work loss pulsing outward from banks’ hunkered-down refusal to issue a perfectly routine performance bond.
It might be true that this is just a temporary situation and, once the shock has worn off, things will get back to normal, the appetite of banks and insurance companies for risk will increase, and the business activity that was supported by the willingness to take risks would come back again.
Or it may be true that we’ve been living with an unrealistically low perception of risk for some time that’s supported a similarly unrealistic level of economic activity. If that’s true, this may be the new normal and the coming times could be very hard, indeed.
“You Are a Dog!”
What many Shiite Afghan men call a woman with the courage to insist on her human freedom. Sadly, a good number of women agree.
She Dreamed a Dream.
When Susan Boyle came out on the stage in “Britain’s Got Talent” — their version of “American Idol” — overweight, frowzy-haired and 47, looking more like a charwoman than a Spice Girl, and confessed that she’d always wanted to be a professional singer, the judges and the audience, Beautiful Young People all, sniggered and got ready for some fun. Then she opened her mouth.
Trembling on the Brink . . .
. . . of huge changes, we are. Will we make it across this threshold? Will we fall back into comfortable darkness, still warm and smelly and shaped to our bodies like a dog’s nest? Will we disintegrate trying to cross the threshold, like a spaceship shuddering apart under the stress of approaching the speed of light?
Science has everything to do with it. Working with science is making me perpetually uneasy. First of all it is disorienting. And humiliating. Finding out how infinitesimally tiny and limited we are. We’re just big enough, and just smart enough, to have found out how tiny and dumb we are, in a teeming, swarming universe that doesn’t need us and that we’re too short-lived and body-burdened, with our brief window of negentropy before we fizzle out like Roman candles, even to get a tiny little piece of. We were better off when we were as myopic and as obsessed with our own blown-large biological affairs as ants, or rutting deer. (Maybe I’m only speaking for myself and how fearful it is to lose the rosy blinders and the purpose of sex.)
With science comes terrifying power that we’re not wise enough to wield, and . . . and a loss of orientation that is expressed both in the unwarranted cockiness of atheists whistling in the dark and in the head-in-the-sand atavism of all kinds of fundamentalists. We’re going over the threshold into an understanding of the cosmos and the gene that will require that we throw out the horse-and-buggy metaphysics that got us this far and almost start over from scratch. Anybody — New-Ager, “Bright,” or traditionalist — who thinks there’s a quick, easy, comfortable answer to that is in denial.
How to stay open, yet to have some guidance . . . what a challenge. You see it in this post at Althouse about Sharia, and you see it in these recent notes by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Even more tha[n] in Hayek’s days, the ecology of the real world is becoming too complex for Aristotelian logic: very, very little of what we do can be safely formalized, meaning asymmetries matter more than ever. Which puts the Western World today at the most dangerous point in its history: unless we get the Bernanke-Summers crowd out of there, it will eventually be destroyed by the machinery of arrogant, formal-thinking civil servants, and Ivy-league semi-retards.
Finally, beyond the current mess, I see no way out of this ecological problem, except through that tacit, unexplainable, seasoned, thoughtful, and aged thing crystalized by traditions & religions –we can’t live without charts and we need to rely on the ones we’ve used for millennia. Le 21e siecle sera religieux, ou ne sera pas!
Is that so? Can religion handle this? Can anything aged handle this, anything that was built on the snug foundation of our ignorance? Can the moral parts of religion withstand cosmology’s assault on its myths? Isn’t religion a willfull staying childish? And isn’t atheism just braggart adolescence with zits? Aren’t all bets off? Can religion’s knowledge about us, what we are, what we need, survive stripped of the myths? Or are the myths part of what we need? If so, then we cannot evolve beyond our current condition, we should never even have gotten this far, and we’ve hit a wall.
Economic lack of confidence coming at the same time is a double whammy. Boom times make people feel manic and optimistic and anticipatory. It’s like those pirates chewing qat for courage. Bust times make us feel shadowed and threatened and like no good can come of this. We’ve swum out too deep, it’s cold and the drug is wearing off.
~ amba, at 4 A.M.
Afterthought: Maybe we must cling to the comforting husk of religion for a while (a century?) the way a butterfly or moth clings to the chrysalis it has just crawled out of while its wings expand. (I’m not saying religion’s knowledge of human nature isn’t deep and wise. I’m saying that scientific discoveries are shattering the myths and explanations that were among religion’s major mechanisms for managing that nature. Of course, I think those discoveries are also shattering the assumptions of mechanistic atheism. So again, all bets are off.)
Ambiance 